The Gadgeteer is reporting on the release of a bunch of new cases for the Nook and Kindle. Some of them look pretty neat, especially the ones with the built-in stand for propping the reader up.
Big Think has an interview with Yale Professor of Computer Science, David Gelernter, expressing some rather silly opinions of the paper book. “Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony”.
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Re: Glelerter
It’s not that silly to avoid demolition of any achievement. A work of architecture can be demolished for a parking lot. The professor’s suggestion is that significant works should not be abolished if no equivalent achievement supplants them.
Even such an exchange is a zero sum deal and the scenario of exchange of print books for screen books is a particularly bad deal since they are not equivalent. Any logic of their interdependence is still being resolved, but the super cession of print by screen for books is pretty loony. There is the market dominance of print as the professor alludes to and the inferior simulations of print qualities and functions conveyed to the screen devices.
As with the symphony, the constraints of print are really attributes and these limitations, augmented by ergonomic features of the paper book, which the professor also mentions, will not be appreciated by screen advocates who are blind sided by obsession with technologies of screen display, network connectivity and automated searching. These attributes of screen reading are unrelated to the paper book. And features of the paper book including efficiencies of legibility, navigation, persistence and self-authentication have not shown up on the screen.